Clunky or subtle?
In the
New York Times Book Review
yesterday, Brad Leithauser reviews Seamus Heaney's latest book of
poetry,
District and Circle,
using Heaney's "rough-hewn, hand-honed" rhyming practices as a
starting-off point. Leithauser characterizes these rhymes as
"dissonances", "jagged, irregular pairings", harmonies that chime
"clunkily" rather than "cleanly" and "have grown harsher over
time". But he's not slamming Heaney's poetry, only noting that by
such touches "a poet fabricates an individual, distinguishing music";
Heaney's half rhymes produce, for Leithauser, a tough, even raw,
music. My own view of off rhymes (first articulated in 1976) is
that they can show great artistry and subtlety. I don't think
that on their own they strike listeners as "dissonant" -- often, quite
the opposite. The effect they convey depends on what other
poetic devices they're combined with.
Leithauser's commentary:
I sometimes think there's no more
reliable way of initially entering a poet's private domain than by
examining what he or she rhymes with what. Certainly, the abbreviated
signature of a good many poets could be read by assembling a sample
list of the end-words of their lines. George Herbert, Lord Byron, Emily
Dickinson, Marianne Moore, James Merrill -- in many cases a savvy reader
could, with all the quiet exultation of a code-breaking cryptographer,
identify the author purely through paired rhyme-words, independent of
what the poem was actually about.
Add to that company the Irish poet Seamus Heaney, Nobel laureate of
1995, whose rhymes are rough-hewn, hand-honed. Dungarees and rosaries?
Whops and footsteps? Joys and tallboy? We're in Heaney country. His
dissonances aren't for every poet; you might even say they're not for
the younger Heaney, whose harmonies have grown harsher over time. W. H.
Auden once promised his readers he'd never again rhyme an "s" sound and
a "z" sound, however concordant they might look on the page (dose,
rose). Similarly, late in life, Elizabeth Bishop explained to her
students that although she'd once rhymed plural and singular (chests,
rest), she planned never to do so again. You'll find both sorts of
rhymes, as well as various jagged, irregular pairings less easy to
characterize, in Heaney's new collection, "District and Circle."
What does it matter? Why should we care whether two words chime cleanly
or clunkily? The issue can seem picayune -- until you recognize that
it's through just such tiny touches, such minimal modifications of
sound, that a poet fabricates an individual, distinguishing music.
As it happens, those two sorts of rhymes are the ones I focus on in my
1976 paper on half rhymes in rock music ("Well this rock and roll has
got to stop. Junior's head is hard as a rock." in Chicago
Linguistic Society 12.676-97). In the first, "feature rhyme",
segments that are not identical are treated as matching for purposes of
rhyme; the segments in question can be vowels (
hell ~
will) or consonants (
dose ~
rose,
stop ~
rock). In the second,
"subsequence rhyme", a truncated consonant cluster counts as matching
the full cluster (
pen ~
mend,
rest ~
chests).
A crucial fact is that almost all the half rhymes in my data were
simple instances of one or the other of these types, and that certain
matches were hugely more frequent than others, to the extent that
half-rhyme matching can be taken as indicating
SIMILARITY IN
SOUND, an idea that has been pursued by later researchers
(Donca Steriade in particular), examining a wide variety of data, from
many languages, and from both "art" poetry and "popular" poetry
(Japanese rap lyrics, for example). There are other indirect
reflections of similarity in sound -- the sounds involved in
phonologically based slips of the tongue, those that are confused in
mishearings, and those that match in "imperfect puns" -- but it now
seems very clear that the practice of poets who use half rhymes is not
a matter of failing to reach some target of "perfect rhyme" (as would
be suggested by this terminology) but rather as aiming for a rather
different target, that of word parts that "sound alike", without
necessarily being identical.
It looks like Leithauser is judging Heaney's rhymes as crude because he
thinks Heaney is choosing not to pick full rhymes and is settling
(almost surely deliberately) for second-best. I'm sure that's not
what's going on in the great lyrics of John Lennon and Bob Dylan, which
are heavy with half rhymes, and I suspect that's not what's going on
with Heaney's poems either (though I haven't read the newest ones
yet). In any case, if Leithauser thinks half rhymes intrinsically
convey some kind of artless rawness, he's just wrong. Maybe he
should brush up on his Hopkins and his Yeats.
zwicky at-sign csli period stanford period edu
Posted by Arnold Zwicky at July 17, 2006 03:44 PM